If she wanted to compete in this dog-eat-pussy world, she had to keep up her personal grooming, even if it meant spreading her legs and letting some Vietnamese woman rip the hair off her cookie every other week.

In North America, a biscuit is a small, soft baked bread similar to a scone but not sweet. In the United Kingdom, a biscuit is a small, crisp or firm, sweet baked good — the sort of thing which in North America is called a cookie. (Less frequently, British speakers refer to crackers as biscuits.) In North America, even small, layered baked sweets like Oreos are referred to as cookies, while in the UK, only those biscuits which have chocolate chips, nuts, fruit, or other things baked into them are also called cookies.

Throughout the English-speaking world, thin, crispy, salty or savoury baked breads like these are called crackers, while thin, crispy, sweet baked goods like these and these are wafers.

Both the US and the UK distinguish crackers, wafers and cookies/biscuits from cakes: the former are generally hard or crisp and become soft when stale, while the latter is generally soft or moist and becomes hard when stale.